The August issue of Cultural Anthropology features a Retrospectives collection on “Sovereignty,” edited by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. In her introduction, Kauanui reflects on how the concept of sovereignty has occupied a tentative and emergent role in anthropological work, tacking between distinct localizations and epistemological frames. Yarimar Bonilla underscores how sovereignty, as a...
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Precarity is an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life. In a growing body of scholarship centered on social marginalization, the concept of precarity has come to name “the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler 2009,...
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